The Fine Arts

The Cornell Fine Arts Museum (Photo by Scott Cook)
The Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College has been awarded an Interpretive Fellowship at Art Museums from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. The museum is one of only seven recipients nationwide given this honor, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frick Collection, both in New York City; the Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the Portland Art Museum.

“We are enormously proud to have been chosen for this prestigious fellowship which gives us the opportunity to make strides on two of our top priorities: researching our permanent collection and mentoring future museum professionals,” said Ena Heller, the Bruce A. Beal Director of the Cornell.

Kress Interpretive Fellowships provide competitive grants in the amount of $30,000 to American art museums which sponsor supervised internships in art museum education. The program is intended to encourage students to explore interpretive careers in art museums; to strengthen the profession of museum educator within the art museum community; to strengthen ties between museum educators and curators in the shared task of interpretive programming in art museums; and to expand the range of promising career options available to students of art history and related fields. At the Cornell, the Kress Interpretive Fellow will conduct research and develop interpretive materials based upon the permanent collection, as well as develop an original exhibition concept.

“The Samuel H. Kress Foundation is extremely pleased to have awarded an Interpretive Fellowship to the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College for the upcoming year. We firmly believe that the strength of the Museum’s collection—which contains two works from the nationally distributed Kress Collection—coupled with the experience and vision that recently appointed director, Ena Heller, brings to the institution will ensure an excellent training opportunity for the Kress Interpretive Fellow, one which we hope will be equally beneficial for the Cornell Fine Arts Museum as it strengthens scholarship on the art in its permanent collection and aims to more fully engage audiences with these outstanding works,” stated Max Marmor, president of the Kress Foundation.